Reality
by elphabathedelirious32
Summary: Oneshot, postmusical. Dying, even if it's not really dying, can't be easy. She had erased the idea of herself from existence and she needed to rewrite it. Fiyeraba.


**A/N: This is a random oneshot...from another one of those little thoughts that stuck in my head and wouldn't leave me alone until I wrote it. **

**Disclaimer: Not mine. Also, the emotional baggage/forklift thing is from Gilmore Girls -"Luke 'table for one' Danes and Lorelai 'Can I get a forklift for my emotional baggage' Gilmore are getting married!" **

She was different when she was here, alone, with him. It was as if she were rediscovering or even re-creating her world; she devoured it all with her eyes and often her hands, as if she needed to touch everything to reassure herself that it was real. Or maybe it was the other way around- she needed to touch everything to reassure herself that _she _was real. Dying, even when it wasn't really dying, can't be easy. She had erased the idea of herself from existence and she needed to rewrite it. Maybe she even wondered if in fact she really _had _died, and everything afterwards was just that: afterwards. The afterlife, to be more specific.

But Fiyero thought it was something else. When it was just her and him and it seemed as if there was no one else in the world, she got a chance to be who she would have been if it weren't for her sister and her father and all that emotional baggage you'd need a forklift to move. If it weren't for her skin. She got a chance to be the very essence of herself, what she had been at birth, before the world imposed itself on her and she imposed herself on it. She had been inversely formed; rather than forming herself to fit the world she had formed herself exactly so that she wouldn't, but the world had still affected her.

So he wasn't surprised when she was outside for hours and came back, uncharacteristically, with armloads of flowers; when the outdoors and their little house seemed to infuse each other, when she filled rooms purposefully with sunlight. He wasn't surprised when she danced to herself under the stars or sang to the moon or jumped headlong into a cold lake. She was grabbing sensations, handfuls and handfuls of sensations of all extremes, to prove to herself that this was life, and she was living. She needed a definition of herself, of what she was without her adversaries. Who was Elphaba without Oz, without the Wizard, without a cause for which to fight? She had been so wrapped up in her cause for so long it had begun to define her, to become an immutable part of her, and it had too quickly been torn away. She had won, the Wizard was gone, but what are revolutionaries when the revolution is over?

He wasn't surprised- well, he kind of was, but pleasantly- when at the strangest times she would grab hold of him, she would take the initiative, and pull him beneath the water or into the grass of a meadow or down onto the sand or into bed and make love to him. He knew what she was doing, knew she was anchoring herself to him and thus to the world, so that the force of her mental world and her imagination didn't pull her entirely away. He could see in her eyes that she was one step away from becoming completely ethereal, that she had such force of will that she could probably vanish completely, nonmagically, if she tried.

She swam a lot, but briefly, diving into the freezing water of the nearby lake and plumbing its depths with a long green hand for a moment before resurfacing and coming out, as if to prove once more to herself that the rumors weren't true and she wasn't what they said she was. She liked to pretend she was entirely above caring what they thought, and so did he, it comforted him to think of her as separate and invincible, but she wasn't. She did care, she just didn't care enough to alter herself for it, and now it was too late. So she swam, oddly enough, to prove to no one who didn't know that she wasn't wicked.

And she wasn't, she truly wasn't. If the rest of Oz could just briefly peer into a magic mirror and look at their lives, they would know that. He had held her as she cried uncontrollable tears at night, and no one who saw her pitiful tears and the resolute way she pretended she had never cried them the next day could ever believe she was evil. If they could see her cry, and stop crying, they could see her for who she was and that she was who she was because of what they had done to her, and they would see where wickedness truly lay.


End file.
